u
The
current administration has designated millions
of acres of federal land off-limits to multiple
uses such as mining---and seems to be attempting
to lock up public land --- all without
consulting Congress or the public.

u
The
administration seems to be conforming U.S.
environmental policy to UN Strategies.

u
The
IUCN, an accredited scientific advisory body to
the UN, incorporates U.S. federal agencies,
non-governmental organizations and UN agencies
in its proclaimed war against "ignorant
humans."

Mining
Voice

Volume
6:2 March-April 2000

With the Grand Canyon National Park as his
backdrop, President Bill Clinton used the 1906
Antiquities Act to set aside one million acres of land
into three national monuments in Arizona, Nevada and
California on January 11 this year. "I know we’re
doing the right thing, because look at the day we’ve
got," Clinton said. "We’ve got the good
Lord’s stamp of approval on this great day."

This was the second time President Clinton used the
Antiquities Act to lock up vast tracts of federal
land. Just days before the presidential election in
1996, he designated 1.7 million acres in southern Utah
as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In
both cases, mining and other natural resource
extraction are prohibited.

The president’s most recent action represents one
more installment in a long list of land to be locked
up. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt has
recommended that a total of five million acres of
national monuments and wilderness areas be set aside
this year. Last October 13, President Clinton declared
60 million acres as "Roadless Areas" within
the National Forest System. In 1998 he initiated the
Clean Water Action Plan that calls for creating even
more roadless area through the withdrawal of 5,000
miles of roads on federal land each year through 2002.

Dr.
Michael S. Coffmanis
CEO of sovereignty International, president of
Environmental Perspectives, Inc. and editor of
Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes in
Bangor, Maine. Sovereignty International is a UN
watchdog and provides educational materials for
policymakers and citizens concerning UN global
governance. Environmental Perspectives, Inc. is
a consulting organization providing educational
information on environmental and global issues.
Dr. Coffman has a Ph.D. in ecosystems analysis
and classification. He played a key role in
helping to stop the Convention on Biological
Diversity from being ratified.

Although these actions greatly change land
management practices on federally controlled land, all
were done without any action or review by Congress.
This has not gone unnoticed. "It appears the
administration has launched an orchestrated campaign
to preclude mining on vast acreages of public lands
governed by multiple-use laws, and to do so without
consulting Congress and without soliciting public
input or independent scientific review," wrote
Missouri Republican Senators John Ashcroft and
Christopher S. Bond and Representative Jo Ann Emerson
in a letter to Secretary Babbitt in June last year.

It seems it is exactly what Babbitt had planned.
Last May he said, "We’ve switched the rules of
the game. We’re not trying to do anything
legislatively."

Babbitt reaffirmed this on October 19: "I am
not prepared to sit back and let this Congress do what
it has done for the last seven years on these areas,
which is virtually nothing . . . If Congress does not
act and produce an acceptable bill protecting these
lands, I will consider asking the president to use his
power [the Antiquities Act]."

The president is now doing exactly what Secretary
Babbitt asked.

Private Property Also
Targeted

Supporters of the president’s efforts shrug off
criticism by saying the designations affect only land
that is already controlled by the federal government.
Not so, argue his critics. They claim the Clinton
administration is not interested in locking up only
federal land; it wants to lock up private land as well
through programs such as the Clean Water Action Plan
and the Lands Legacy Initiative.

The Clean Water Action Plan dramatically expands
the 1976 Clean Water Act by administratively shifting
water protection from point source pollution (a single
factory or city) to non-point source pollution over an
entire watershed. Again, Congress has taken no action
to authorize such a huge change in national policy.
Yet when the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA)
and Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Clean Water
Action Plan is completed it will extend federal land
use jurisdiction to all of the 2,100 watersheds in
America.

MORE
THAN 20 MILLION ACRES OF PRIVATE LAND COULD BE
PURCHASED OVER THE NEXT DECADE WITH NO
CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT

The Action Plan also imposes buffer zones of
"natural" habitat with a minimum of 100 feet
on private land along two million miles of U.S.
streams and rivers — a minimum of 48 million acres
of private property (using a 100-foot buffer on both
sides of a stream or river). The USDA’s Stream
Corridor Restoration manual, which defines how the
stream buffers will be organized, actually calls for
the buffer to extend over the entire 100-year
floodplain, which can be several miles wide in some
regions.

The Lands Legacy Initiative historically has been
funded by Congress at $200 million to $300 million
annually to buy private land. The president wants that
increased to nearly $1 billion a year. Even more
disturbing, he is asking that the funding be included
in a new budget item so that the $1 billion is granted
in perpetuity. More than 10 million acres of private
land could be purchased over the next decade with no
congressional oversight.

The Clinton administration is locking up land so
fast that the Associated Press reported on January 16,
"Conservation proposals are falling like rain
from the White House as President Clinton tries to
create an environmental legacy . . . Authorities
inside and outside government cannot remember when
there has been so much activity."

During the landmark dedication ceremonies at the
Grand Canyon, Clinton had rebutted such criticisms by
assuring us that "If it’s a legacy for the
children of America . . . for hundreds of years into
the future, then it’s not a bad gift to give."

The problem is that Clinton’s record doesn’t
support his claim to concern for children. When he
decreed the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument in 1996, he locked up the largest
clean coal deposit in the world, forcing U.S. industry
to go to foreign sources for clean coal in the future.
In the process, 1,000 jobs were lost, and families
across America are having to pay more for electricity.
Of greater concern, the public school system of Utah
was denied an estimated $2 billion in royalties,
according to the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

If the president is not locking up land for the
children, as he claims, just why is he locking it up?
Government already owns or controls 40 percent of the
United States. Just how much land is enough?

The International Connection

Critics of the administration’s land grab point
to the United Nations (UN). They accuse the president
of implementing the UN’s Agenda 21 and the
Convention on Biological Diversity. Both were
introduced during the June 1992 Earth Summit held in
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Agenda 21
is a 40-chapter tome focused on
reorganizing society around "sustainable"
use and development of the planet. Based on socialist
principles of equal sharing of all natural resources,
Agenda 21 sets a goal to control all human activity to
protect the Earth’s ecosystems and biological
diversity. Mining, for instance, would have to be
"environmentally sound" and could only be
done "in areas adjacent to protected areas with a
view to furthering protection of these areas."
The meaning of "protected areas" and
"environmentally sound" is not defined in
Agenda 21, but it is clarified in the UN Convention on
Biological Diversity (Biodiversity Treaty) and the
Wildlands Project.

For a larger scale map, click
here. The
Wildlands Project would set up to one-half of
America into core wilderness reserves and
interconnecting corridors (red), all surrounded
by interconnecting buffer zones (yellow). No
human activity would be permitted in the red,
and only highly regulated activity would be
permitted in the yellow areas. Four concerned
conservative activists who now make up the board
of Sovereignty International were able to find
UN documentation that proved the Wildlands
Project concept was to provide the basis for the
UN Convention on Biological Diversity and used
this information and this map to stop the
ratification of the treaty an hour before its
scheduled cloture and ratification vote.

Taken From: The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 8a-e; United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment, Section 13.4.2.2.3; US Man and the Biosphere Strategic Plan, UN/US Heritage
Corridor Program, "The Wildlands Project", Wild Earth, 1992,. Also see Science, "The High Cost of Biodiversity," 25 June, 1993, pp 1968-1871.
The very high percentage of buffer zone in the West is due to the very high percentage of federal land.

The Wildlands Project is the master plan for both
Agenda 21 and the Biodiversity Treaty, and represents
a grandiose design to transform at least half the land
area of the continental United States into an immense
"eco-park" cleansed of modern industry and
private property. The Wildlands concept is largely the
work of Dave Foreman, the principal founder of the
eco-terrorist group Earth First! and a current member
of the board of the Sierra Club. Foreman describes the
Wildlands Project as an effort to "tie the North
American continent into a single Biodiversity
Preserve." Foreman summarizes Wildlands as
"a bold attempt to grope our way back to
1492" — that is, to repeal a half-millennium of
Western civilization, with its unique blessings of
material prosperity, technological progress, private
property and individual rights.

According to Foreman, Wildlands activists would
"identify existing protected areas" such as
federal and state wilderness areas, parks, national
monuments, refuges and other designated sites; such
tracts would serve as "core reserves"
completely off-limits to human activity. The next step
would be to create wilderness corridors along streams,
rivers and mountain ranges that interconnect the core
reserves. Where necessary, private property would be
purchased, condemned or regulated to fill in the gaps
where public land did not exist.

The activists would then demand the creation of
"buffer zones" to further protect the core
areas and corridors. Wildlands Project co-author Reed
Noss explains that in the core, corridor and buffer
areas, "The collective needs of non-human species
must take precedence over the needs and desires of
humans." Because mining is viewed as highly
destructive, it cannot be allowed in protected areas,
and its use must be severely limited elsewhere so as
to be "environmentally sound."

Noss defined the all-encompassing magnitude of the
Wildlands Project in Wild
Earth, the publication of
the Cenozoic Society. Noss explains that "Half of
a region in wilderness is a reasonable guess of what
it will take to restore viable populations of large
carnivores and natural disturbance regimes, assuming
that most of the other 50 percent is managed
intelligently as buffer zones. Eventually, a
wilderness network would dominate a region and thus
would itself constitute the matrix, with human
habitations being the islands."

John Davis, editor of Wild Earth, acknowledges that
the Wildlands Project seeks nothing less than
"the end of industrial civilization....
Everything civilized must go. . ."

In this bizarre scheme, human civilization must be
radically reconfigured, mines would be closed, roads
torn from the landscape, timber harvesting stopped and
human populations relocated. All of this is to be
done, according to Wildlands co-founder Michael
Soulé, in harmony with a prophetic vision: "The
oracles are the fishes of the river, the fishers of
the forest and articulate toads. Our naturalists and
conservation biologists can help us translate their
utterances. Our spokespersons, fund-raisers and
grass-roots organizers will show us how to implement
their sage advice."

Defeating the Biodiversity
Treaty

All of this could be dismissed as flatly ridiculous
were it not for its central role in the UN Convention
on Biological Diversity. The Biodiversity Treaty would
permit a restructured and unaccountable UN Trusteeship
Council to regulate any human activity that presents
potential harm to biological diversity. In principle,
this mandate would cover all human activity, given
that almost anything humans do is deemed as harmful to
biological diversity. The text of the treaty itself
was a skimpy 18-page framework, or what Senator Jesse
Helms (R-NC) correctly called "a preamble falsely
described as a treaty."

THE
BIODIVERSITY TREATY WOULD PERMIT A RESTRUCTURED
AND UNACCOUNTABLE UN TRUSTEESHIP COUNCIL TO
REGULATE ANY HUMAN ACTIVITY THAT PRESENTS
POTENTIAL HARM TO BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY

The Senate was asked to authorize the creation of
implementing "protocols" that would be
written after the treaty had been ratified and would
be binding upon the signatories. The
"factual" information upon which the
implementing language was to be based was found in a
1,140-page UN Global Biodiversity Assessment (GBA)
that was in draft form when the Senate was considering
the treaty.

The Senate was poised to ratify the Biodiversity
Treaty in September 1994, when the American sheep
industry obtained a portion of the draft GBA from the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature
(IUCN) in Switzerland, the original author of the
treaty. To carry out the terms of the treaty,
according to the GBA, "Representative areas of
all major ecosystems in a region need to be
reserved," and such "[reserved] blocks
should be as large as possible . . . buffer zones
should be established around core areas and . . .
corridors should connect these areas. This basic
design is central to the Wildlands Project in the
United States . . . a controversial . . . strategy . .
. to expand natural habitats and corridors to cover as
much as 30 percent of the U.S. land area."

In fact, Wildlands would re-primitivize no less
than 50 percent of the U.S. land area.

The draft GBA, along with maps provided by
Environmental Perspectives, Inc. depicting what this
would look like when fully implemented, arrived the
day of the vote and was taken to the Senate floor by
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) a mere hour
before the scheduled cloture vote for the treaty. The
extremely controversial UN information caused
then-Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME) to
withdraw the treaty from consideration. It was never
voted on.

The connection between the Biodiversity Treaty and
the Wildlands Project was not a coincidence. The
treaty was originally written by the IUCN in 1982,
about the time it was promoting a new science called
conservation biology, which, in turn, provided the
justification for the Biodiversity Treaty. Two of the
key promoters of this unproven science were none other
than Reed Noss and Michael Soulé who, along with Dave
Foreman, co-authored the Wildlands Project. Although
few Americans have even heard of the IUCN, this
organization has its fingerprints on just about every
alleged environmental problem in America today.

The IUCN

The IUCN
is an accredited scientific advisory body
to the United Nations. Its members include 878 state
and federal governmental agencies and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) in 181 countries. The IUCN’s
official mission is "to influence, encourage and
assist societies throughout the world to conserve the
integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that
any use of natural re-sources is equitable and
ecologically sustainable."

The IUCN has provided many laudable services since
its creation in 1946. There are problems, however,
originating from its very peculiar vision of
"equity," "sustainability" and
natural "diversity."

The spring 1996 issue of the IUCN’s Ethics
Working Group’s publication, Earth
Ethics, candidly
admits that the IUCN "promotes alternative models
for sustainable communities and lifestyles, based in
ecospiritual practices and principles . . . to
accelerate our transition to a just and sustainable
future . . . humanity must undergo a radical change in
its attitudes, values and behavior. . . In response to
this situation, a new global ethic is taking form, and
it is finding expression in international law."
[Italics added.]

Despite its pretensions to being a scientific body,
the IUCN eschews the scientific method when it is
convenient to do so. The organization’s Commission
on Environmental Strategy and Planning (now the
Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social
Policy) claims a mandate to "change human
behavior" by using a strategy "based less on
the facts . . . than on the values they hold."

Indeed, the IUCN’s entire approach to conserving
the "integrity and diversity of nature" is
based not on facts, but essentially on religious
theories of conservation biology. The theories are
themselves rooted in a version of pantheism — the
belief that nature is god and therefore knows best,
and that all human activity leads to
"fragmentation" of ecosystems, which in turn
leads to a depletion of biodiversity.

Fragmentation leaves "islands" of
undisturbed ecosystems that supposedly are too small
to maintain biodiversity. Protecting and expanding
these "islands" of biodiversity thus becomes
imperative, as does connecting these
"islands" by "wildlife corridors."
Thus the basic template of the Wildlands Project is
derived directly from the IUCN’s
"ecospiritual" assumptions.

The IUCN bias for "values" rather than
"facts" is reflected in the very first issue
of the IUCN-created journal Conservation
Biology:
"By joining together those who are [wise], the
worst biological disaster in the last 65 million years
can be averted. We assume that environmental wounds
inflicted by ignorant humans and destructive
technologies can be treated by wiser humans." As
might be expected, the "ignorant humans" are
the miners, timber harvesters and resource developers
who provide goods and services to all Americans.

Beyond IUCN

Of particular concern is the shocking realization
that IUCN membership incorporates various U.S. federal
agencies, NGOs and UN agencies as allies in its war
against "ignorant humans." Through the IUCN,
government agencies such as the U.S. Fish &
Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the U.S.
Forest Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) and EPA can huddle in private
with the Society of Conservation Biology, the Sierra
Club, the Nature Conservancy, the National Wildlife
Federation, the National Audubon Society, the Natural
Resources Defense Council and the Environmental
Defense Fund. Also included are the United Nations
Education Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO), the United Nations Development Program
(UNDP) and the United Nations Environmental Program
(UNEP).

Most IUCN funding comes from government agencies
and private foundations like the Ford and MacArthur
foundations. The U.S. State Department is contributing
$255 million to the IUCN in FY 2000 and is budgeting
an equal amount for 2001. The U.S. Forest Service,
National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service
also contribute unspecified amounts of funds.

By playing the role of scientific advisor, the IUCN
coalition of federal agencies and NGOs is developing
joint strategies to implement the
"ecospiritual" theology like the science of
conservation biology in America. Federal agencies then
redefine existing law to conform to international law
and agreements like the Biodiversity Treaty, UNESCO’s
Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB) and UNESCO’s
World Heritage Treaty. The Senate gave its advice and
consent to ratification of the World Heritage
Convention in 1973; the MAB program was unilaterally
implemented by the State Department the same year
through "memoranda of understandings"
without input or oversight by Congress.

Both programs have been quietly implemented by
federal and state bureaucrats with little or no input
from local citizenry. An archipelago of 47 Biosphere
Reserves and 20 World Heritage Sites occupying more
than 53 million acres of U.S. soil already has been
established with little to no congressional oversight.
Even so, the United Nations claims no sovereignty over
our parks. This begs the question: How is
"sovereignty" defined in this context?

Implementing the Global
Vision

During a September 22, 1997, address to the UN
General Assembly, President Clinton suggested he is in
agreement with UN goals: "The forces of global
integration are a great tide, inexorably wearing away
the established order of things . . . New global
environmental challenges require us to find . . . a
new strategy of security . . . Nations have begun to
put that strategy in place through a new network of
institutions and arrangements . . . Through this web
of institutions and arrangements, nations are now
setting the international ground rules for the 21st
century . . . isolating those who challenge them from
the outside." [Italics added.]

In saying this, the president reaffirmed that his
administration has been conforming U.S. policy to UN
strategies since he took office. An August 1993 EPA
internal working document has provided the blueprint
for implementing UN policy in the United States during
his entire presidency: "Natural resource and
environmental agencies . . . should . . . develop a
joint strategy to help the United States fulfill its
existing international obligations (e.g. Convention on
Biological Diversity, Agenda 21) . . . The executive
branch should direct federal agencies to evaluate
national policies . . . in light of international
policies and obligations, and to amend national
policies to achieve international objectives."

Clinton’s actions in setting aside huge national
landmarks, wilderness areas and interconnecting river
corridors via the Clean Water Action Plan are being
done to fulfill the requirements of the Convention on
Biological Diversity and the Wildlands Project, even
though the U.S. Senate never gave its advice and
consent to ratification of the treaty as required by
the Constitution of the United States.

Will Environmentalism Destroy
the Environment?

These initiatives represent a major threat to
private property and the control of government over
American citizens. The cabal of IUCN, NGOs, federal
agencies, UN bureaucracies and private foundations are
knowingly and unknowingly manipulating the system to
destroy the mining and extractive industries in
America. By doing so they are forcing citizens of
industrialized nations to get needed raw materials
from Third World nations that — even with mining and
environmental laws on the books — often have no
means or desire to enforce them.

This point was tragically brought home earlier this
year when three devastating dam breaches occurred at
two different northern Romanian mines. The January
spill occurred at the Aurul Gold Mine and dumped 100
metric tons of cyanide-rich slurry into the River
Somes. Half the mine is owned by Esmeralda
Exploration, an Australian company. The other 50
percent is owned by the Romanian government.

The second and third spills occurred at Baia Borsa,
dumping zinc, lead and copper into the Viseu River.
The Viseu flows through the Ukraine, then Hungary,
where both rivers empty into the Tisza River. The
Tisza joins the Danube in Serbia before looping back
along the Romania-Bulgaria border and then through
eastern Romania to the Black Sea. Thousands of fish
were killed, along with the supporting habitats of the
river ecosystems.

Romania has mining laws. They just were not
enforced effectively, and a horrible environmental
disaster occurred. Could the world see more of these
disasters if mining is relegated to areas where
enforcement is less than it should be?

The March to Global
Governance

The United Nations advocates a solution in what is
known as "global governance." The kinds of
accidents that occurred in Romania theoretically would
be prevented through interlocking international
environmental and social treaties and agreements like
the Biodiversity Treaty. Implementing global
governance, however, would require a complete
restructuring of the United Nations. The changes that
would be necessary are spelled out in the United
Nations-funded Commission on Global Governance’s
1995 report Our Global
Neighborhood. If implemented,
the restructuring would enable the United Nations to
control every aspect of global society and commerce.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan began to implement
these recommendations in July 1997. The changes
include redirecting the mission of the UN Trusteeship
Council to enforce environmental treaties and
agreements so as to protect Earth’s environment.
However, this change in mission and many other
recommended changes would require a new UN charter.
Such a charter originally was to be signed by all
heads of state during the UN Millennium Summit in New
York, scheduled to start September 6 this year. That
goal was changed, however, when it was exposed by
Sovereignty International, a UN watchdog organization.

As bad as the attacks by U.S. federal agencies on
mining and natural resource extraction industries have
been for the past few years, they are nothing compared
with what they will be if a new UN Trusteeship Council
becomes operational. In the global governance plan
there are no real checks and balances built in to keep
bureaucrats and NGOs from doing as they please. There
is no accountability, even to the people of the world.
Such a system can bring only corruption, inefficiency
and eventually tyranny.

Education Is the Key

It seems incredible that there are those in
positions of power who knowingly or unknowingly seek
to destroy the very sector of our economy that
provides the goods, services and fundamental wealth of
the United States. Until technology can create
materials out of thin air, everything that we use and
eat starts as a natural resource either on or under
the land.

Yet America can have the best of both worlds. It
has some of the toughest mining laws in the world. Our
society has the wealth to pay for environmental
protection while providing the goods and services
people demand. The overwhelming majority of our mining
companies employ environmental protections even for
their operations in developing nations that do not
require them.

In every place where a part of the global
governance agenda has been exposed, people have
effectively rallied to stop its implementation. The
role of informed citizens has repeatedly vindicated
Thomas Jefferson’s belief that there is "no
safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society
but by the people themselves. And if we think them not
enlightened enough to exercise their control with a
wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it
from them, but to inform their discretion by
education."

Stopping the march to global governance will only
happen if principled Americans unite, get the facts
straight and expose the Wildlands Project, Agenda 21,
the Biosphere Reserve program and related endeavors as
lethal threats to our independence and constitutional
order.